An Odd mix

We were stood outside, in the light drizzle, at the first street party of the season - rue Aigle D'or, Saturday night - when a Ryanair jet flew low overhead on it's final approach to Carcassonne airport. "Blimey, that's a bit late" was the general view, before everyone got back to the serious business of Minervois wine tasting - the excuse for the party - and dancing and singing along to the camp euro club classics that seem to be all the rage here. The Boys Town Gang version of 'Can't take my eyes off you' was still ringing in my ears 24 hours after. Anyway, enough about the highly cultural Saturday evenings that Debrah and I occasionally embark upon and back to the aeroplane.

In the same way that I managed to misjudge a parking space recently, thus shattering the front offside indicator on the Audi - now fixed again - the pilot of the lunchtime flight back to Stansted on Saturday misjudged the length of the wings and the nearness of the terminal building whilst taxiing, resulting in a bit of damage to both stationary and moving object and rendering the flight non-operable in an instant. I am sure that within Ryanair, the pilot will become known as 'the man who hit the terminal in Carcassonne'. End of promising career.

The flight coming in so late was the replacement plane to fly the poor passengers to London finally - I guess they had spent 12 hours at the airport, which must be the grimmest 12 hours I could imagine - there being absolutely nothing to do at Carcassonne airport. The damaged plane remains here whilst the engineers rushed up from Gerona in Spain decide what to do with it. Naturally, this incident that saw nobody hurt and a bit of minor damage and some inconvenience to 130 passengers was front page news in the local papers, trumping both the vide-grenier (rubbish - literally) and the overnight torching of a car in the poor suburb (predictable).

My late night Saturday was followed by a late night Sunday dinner with guests who didn't want to go to bed and another day of changeovers, airport runs and new guest arrivals today. As soon as I finish writing this I'll be off to bed, especially as my new guests want an 8am breakfast.

This morning's activity was hampered by not wanting to miss a delivery that was crucial to the timing of the renovation works going on upstairs in Denis' apartment. My doorbell is not the loudest and therefore easy to miss, especially if I am cleaning out a bathroom, with the extractor fan whirring away, or vacuuming or just distracted by the noise of the street. Having missed the delivery last week, the delivery company had promised me last Friday that the parcel would be re-delivered before 1pm today - so it was no surprise at all that it finally turned up at 2.50pm - right on French time - clearly the driver had been behind schedule and stopped for lunch and you can't complain about a Frenchman's right to stop for lunch.

Talking of food, Debrah and I munched our way through 3kg of delicious local mussels at the weekend - which I tell you just because I was impressed with our effort - not to mention the hour I spent beforehand cleaning them all.

One set of guests went out to Le Parc, one of our Michelin starred restaurants, for a birthday celebration. Whilst they were waiting downstairs at the end of the archway for the cab to appear, she was blatently chatted up by a passer-by, who said that he wanted to paint her and that she was beautiful, all right in front of her boyfriend. Debrah complains about the same attitude from French women who flirt with me in front of her before giving her a withering look of disdain. Bizarre behaviour.

On the theme of bizarre behaviour, a woman dressed as a banana got off Debrah's flight on Friday lunchtime and a man/woman (couldn't tell which) dressed as a horse was handing out leaflets in the square. The horse was promoting the race meeting on Sunday. I think the banana was part of a hen party and we certainly don't want to encourage that type of activity - thankfully we didn't see her again.

So there it is, the usual mixture of wierd and wonderful, odd and original and mundane and marvellous that makes up a normal weekend in Carcassonne. What's next?